Tag Archives: GableStage

Here’s a look back at 2014 including a very subjective subjunctive reductive list of outstanding shows, performances and developments guaranteed to make someone unhappy they were not on the list. Take comfort in that there was so much good work that this is the crème de la crème de menthe.

As if it was even needed, molten lava in the guise of scalding verbal acrimony ravages the apartment where incendiary family strife already was poised to detonate into devastation in GableStage’s uproarious and upsetting Bad Jews.

Usually there isn’t anything sexy or newsworthy about real estate in the world of theater unless it’s Glengarry Glen Ross. But as the season approaches, South Florida hasn’t seen so much packing and unpacking, opening tubes of Ben Gay, filling out of change-of-address cards, remodeling, scanning blueprints and updating websites as in the past season and the one coming up

Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale at GableStage focuses on a morbidly obese man wanting to reconnect with his abandoned daughter before his imminent death. But the darkly funny and affecting play — awash in profanity, cynicism, alienation and fatalism — reveals itself to be about hope rooted in the innate decency inside scalded souls.

The curtain is not expected to rise on the first production at the “new” Coconut Grove Playhouse for five years, county documents indicate. But work on the project began in earnest this month. The county is in the process of hiring an architect, and GableStage, which will operate the theater, has hired a consultant.

The snowbirds have gone home, but South Florida theater never seems to go dark these days. This year-round trend has never been clearer than right now with a calendar is jammed with an overwhelming cornucopia of options over the next two or three weeks. Here’s an incomplete overview:

Certainly, The Mountaintop is about Martin Luther King’s place in the civil rights struggle, but the superb production at GableStage examines a more universal issue of how ever-present mortality makes impossible reaching an ultimate goal – which makes the pursuit all the more laudable.